Let it Die →
Grim and very cold-blooded analysis of why an economy in which you can become wealthy not by doing anything that adds value to the world, but by betting on others’ doing or not doing so, is not an economy worth holding on to.
Archive for March 2009
Zionism is the Problem →
Great insight from Ben Ehrenreich in the LA Times. World War II created this unfortunate situation, where Jews — because of all the woes they had experienced — were regarded as a protected race, one that shouldn’t be held accountable for its actions.
While many Jews obviously didn’t act on this situation, Zionists used the platform to launch an outrageous assault on Palestinians, whose only crimes were living in the area that was now artificially being re-labelled Israel. (Jews’ debatable right to the land notwithstanding.)
Periodic Table of Typefaces →
I see a theme coming. Oh well, I’d really like a large print out of this one.
(Via Mike Davidson.)
$2.7 billion question →
Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering’s analysis of what makes Amazon’s ‘Was this review helpful to you?’ so brilliant.
What really makes it brilliant for me is its simplicity. No complicated ratings of five or more stars — you simply need to check with yourself if it was helpful or not.
Television Themes →
A directory I’ve had lying around for far too long.
Of particular joy for me is the Mighty Morfin Power Rangers Theme (MP3).
Alex Payne on Tech Journalism →
TechCrunch’s is one of the most widely[ ]heard voices in technology reporting. This should be considered an embarrassment to our industry.
I stopped reading TechCrunch shortly after I started; I found that the signal to noise ratio was incredibly low. I hear it has not got any better.
A Dropbox tip
I’m a Dropbox user. (That link is a referral link, which will earn me 250 MB of additional space if you register.) Not a power user, and I currently only use .9% of my 2GB free plan, but a user nonetheless.
I have, however, found a very useful use case for the service. In my Documents folder, I have a Writings/DRAFTS folder. This is where I store drafts for posts on Simply Jonathan.
Now, Dropbox works this way: you have a folder called “My Dropbox”. You can choose the location of this for yourself, but the default location on Mac OS X is ~/Dropbox.
The important thing to notice is that these are not identical. And only stuff you put in your Dropbox gets synced.
Not to worry, though, because a little UNIX style magic is all it takes. Using the power of symbolic links (symlink), I was a able to achieve exactly what I wanted: having Dropbox sync an out-of-scope folder or file.
Now, symlinks are nothing new, and this was not a matter of whether a symlink could live in the Dropbox — it was merely a pleasant discovery that it also synced the contents of it.